Nelson Mandela, the former president
of South Africa, electrified the closing session of the 13th International
Conference on AIDS last Friday, July 14 with his mere presence.
He entered to a sustained standing ovation, complete with cries
in Zulu and other dialects of the region, and chants from the
struggle to end apartheid.

He looked frail but his ringing
voice belied his 82 years and offered a capstone of hope that
the attendees had been seeking. "If 27 years in prison have
done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to
make us understand how precious words are and how real speech
is in its impact upon the way people live or die," said Mandela
on the conference theme of "Break the Silence."

He did not directly mention the
controversy surrounding President Thabo Mbeki's embrace of AIDS
denialists or the substance of those issues, both of which dominated
discussion and news coverage of the conference. Mandela called
them a distraction "from the real life and death issues."
He praised Mbeki several times during the course of his speech.

Mandela said that "the ordinary
people" and especially "the poor who bear a disproportionate
burden of this scourge Ö wish that the dispute about the
primacy of politics or science be put on the back burner and that
we proceed to address the needs and concerns of those suffering
and dying. And this can only be done in a partnership."

He called upon the tradition of
collective leadership in Africa. "In the face of the grave
threat posed by HIV/AIDS, we have to rise above our differences
and combine our efforts to save our people," he said. "History
will judge us harshly if we fail to do so now, and right now."

Mandela outlined the need for programs
that work to "banish stigma and discrimination," prevent
new infections, offer treatment, and support the survivors. He
specifically supported "measures to reduce mother-to-child
transmission," an action resisted by the South African government.
Those words generated one of the many bursts of applause.

"Others will not save us if
we do not primarily commit ourselves," said Mandela, but
that did not negate the need for support and alliances both within
societies and from without. He concluded, "Let us combine
our efforts to ensure a future for our children."

"You cannot imagine how your
speech is music to our ears," said conference chair Jerry
Coodavia. "It has answered so many unspoken and spoken questions
on our lips. It has filled the torment in our hearts." He
pledged, on behalf of scientists, that they would do their part.

Assessing the Conference

"I've been coming to this meeting
since 1988 and this is by far the best International AIDS Conference
that I've ever been to," said David Barr, an AIDS advocate
from New York. "It is the first time that a whole new set
of issues have been raised concerning how health care is provided."
That includes the roles of industry, government, and "what
things cost."

Pulitzer Prize-winning AIDS journalist
Laurie Garrett called the conference "a huge turning point"
in dealing with "access to care, inequity in north-south
relations, the whole agenda of how can HAART [highly active antiretroviral
therapy] get to everybody."

"There is clear evidence of
a major political shift," said Bill Arnold, with the ADAP
Working Group in Washington, D.C. "Clearly industry has gone
through a whole bunch of behind closed doors type decisions"
about how they are going to meet the call for access to therapy
for the poorer nations.

"It was tremendously important
to come here and see the face of AIDS as it affects most of the
world," said David Scondras, a Boston activist who also was
appointed by President Mbeki and serves on the South African AIDS
Commission. He is encouraged by the movement to forge the types
of partnerships of government, industry, and community people
necessary to confront the epidemic.

"When we chose South Africa,
many, many expressed their concerns, particularly those who are
not with us today," said Stefano Vella, incoming president
of the International AIDS Society which organized the conference.
"But this conference proved that they were wrong."

"This is a conference where
we should have brought our children, because it is our commitment
to teach future generations to fight HIV and AIDS," said
Vella.

Among the Missing

New York activist Mark Harrington
singled out some of the missing for special criticism. "There
is a real 'Mafia' that controls not only the ACTG [U.S. AIDS Clinical
Trails Group] but they control the retrovirus conference [which
meets in January in the U.S.]. And guess what, they're not here,"
he said. He works with the Treatment Action Group and is the recipient
of a five-year MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant for
his work in AIDS advocacy.

"Chip Schooley didn't come
and neither did Connie Benson, or Doug Richmond," said Harrington,
naming three of the leading researchers and administrators. "I
think that is a little bit of a 'fuck you' to the rest of the
world, particularly to the developing world," he continued.
"They have the largest clinical trials infrastructure in
the world and they didn't even bother coming to see. I think that
is a little rude."

"How can Paul Volberding not
be here?" cried another advocate, who asked not to be quoted
by name. The University of California at San Francisco researcher
is editor of the leading peer review journal JAIDS.

Cornelius Baker took a different
tact, "The reality is that there is no one not here that
we couldn't live without. The people who are here are the people
who are very much committed to the future of this epidemic, which
means really ending it in every corner of the world."

"If 90 percent of the people
have either no access to the drugs or the drugs are not useful
to them in their part of the world, then we are producing useless
science," Baker continued. The former executive director
of the National Association of People With AIDS and current head
of the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, one of the largest
AIDS services organizations in the U.S., said, "The world
that mattered was here."

The IAS also announced that they
would begin sponsoring a conference on HIV pathogenesis and treatment
to be held in alternate years. Unlike the Durban conference, which
included social sciences and community leaders, it will focus
only on science. The first will be next July in Buenos Aires,
Argentina.

The U.S. retroviral conference was
established when IAS moved from an annual to a biennial frequency.
While Vella denied there was any formal competition with the January
meeting, there was an undercurrent of unhappiness with the American
dominated event. Plus, its capped enrollment has meant that hundreds
of people have been turned away from participating over the last
few years.

David Barr thought that the science-only
focus of the new meeting was "really a mistake. What we should
be doing is convincing the biomedical scientists to come back in to this
meeting rather than give them even more reason to divorce themselves
from it."

webmaster's
postscript:
There is increasing public objection to the venue of the International
AIDS Conference selected to be in Toronto Canada in 2004.WHY
SHOULD THIS CONFERENCE RETURN TO NORTH AMERICA WHEN IT IS SO
NEEDED IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD?

May 2001 Breaking
News:

THE 2004 INTERNATIONAL
AIDS CONFERENCE MOVED TO THAILAND!

The International AIDS Society is pleased to announce that the
XV International AIDS Conference has been moved from its original
planned location in Toronto (Canada) to Bangkok, (Thailand).

The final decision was taken during the IAS Governing Council
Retreat Meeting, (May 12, 2001) after a process which carefully
reviewed the logistical, organizative and scientific requirements,
and after consultation with the conference co-organizers, UNAIDS,
ICASO, GNP+ and ICW.

In 2000, IAS brought the International AIDS Conference to Durban,
South Africa.

"Break the Silence" was the theme of the conference.

And, indeed, the silence was broken, Durban representing a turning
point in the international fight against AIDS, with increasing
difficulties for political leaders in Africa and elsewhere in
the South to remain silent and complacent, but also for their
counterparts in the North to deny efficient support. Nobody will
be able to stop the process that started there and which will
bring more HIV prevention and care to the South.

This is the reason why IAS decided to move the XV Conference
from the North to the South of the world, to yet another epicenter
of the epidemic. HIV/AIDS concerns the whole world: if we do
not globally address the catastrophe, the spread of HIV during
the next decade might be even more rampant in Asia and the Pacific
than what has happened to date in sub-Saharan Africa. According
to the estimation of WHO and UNAIDS, Asia - being home to more
than one-third of the world population and harboring more than
one-fourth of the world's new HIV infections - is potentially
facing a devastating spread of the epidemic.

The next international Conference will take place in Barcelona,
in July 2002, and the subsequent conference was already scheduled
to take place, in 2004, in Toronto, Canada. We should therefore
acknowledge the great sensitivity of the IAS Immediate Past-President
Mark Wainberg, who was the appointed Chair of the 2004 Conference
and who proactively supported the decision to move the conference.
We also want to acknowledge and thank the Toronto Convention
Center, who kindly allowed IAS to postpone the Toronto conference.

"Asia offers lessons learned on local responses for a large
range of interventions in prevention and control of HIV. In most
of Asia, there are examples of excellent HIV/AIDS prevention
and care projects and of major international research collaboration.
Choosing Thailand as a venue for conducting the XV International
AIDS Conference will serve to further highlight the crucial need
for action and response to the epidemic in countries in the developing
world", according to Dr. Somsong Rugpao, Director General,
Department of Communicable Disease Control, Ministry of Public
Health, Thailand.

The 2004 Bangkok AIDS Conference will be organized by the IAS
and the Thai Ministry of Public Health in collaboration with
UNAIDS and with ICASO, GNP+ and ICW.

We look forward of working together with you, to make the Bangkok
Conference another milestone in the fight against HIV/AIDS.